


Beginnings

by ponweiwest



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, M/M, its basically just a gayer retelling of the way they met - Freeform, that sweet sweet guard/prisoner dynamic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-19 03:51:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5952664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponweiwest/pseuds/ponweiwest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>FN-2187 finds himself on prisoner duty, and he's determined not to show weakness like he did back on Jakku.<br/>Poe finds himself in a First Order holding cell, and he's determined to talk his way out of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beginnings

-FN-2187-

This is quite possibly the worst day of FN-2187's life. On the shuttle ride back from Jakku, he swore he'd shape up. He’d be the perfect stormtrooper, just like the rest of them. But of course Captain Phasma caught him without his helmet, and even worse she ordered him to submit his blaster for inspection. Of course he got saddled with prisoner duty. They didn't even put him in the nice holding cells- he got the bleak ones, the real dramatic ones they made for intimidating prisoners, with the low ceilings, just one small cell at the end of a long gunmetal room. The prisoners are even blocked off by steel bars so tightly crossed that you can only stick a few fingers through the cracks. You could probably fit a lot of tentacles through there, FN-2187 thinks. That's probably a safety concern. He rolls a shoulder, unsticking the white plastic of his armor from his skin, and eyes the holes between the bars. And of course the prisoner chooses that exact moment to wake up and see FN-2187 looking in his direction. It makes sense, because the worst part of the stormtrooper's punishment is the company.

The rebel fighter, X-wing pilot, Black Leader Poe Dameron.

 

-Poe-

When Poe wakes up, the stormtrooper’s looking at him. It’s a  little unnerving, actually. Through his blurred vision, all Poe can see is the shift of black joints as the stormtrooper turns around again, almost awkwardly. Poe squints, tries to shift onto his elbows to peer out the bars of his cage better, and instantly regrets it. Pain shoots through his head, arcing through his tired muscles and making him bite his lip to suppress a groan. Memories rush back to him- the restraints around his arms, the crack of stormtrooper’s blows, what Kylo Ren did to him…

 _Oh, gods._ He told the First Order the location of the map. He wasn’t strong enough to resist Ren, wasn’t strong enough to save anyone he cares about…

Poe snaps out of his dark thoughts with considerable effort, and pulls himself up into a sitting position against the wall. None of those thoughts would help him now, and neither would lying on the ground. He studies the back of the stormtrooper at the far side of the room. His friends back on base always said that Poe can talk his way out of anything. They also said Poe's mouth would kill him, and Poe briefly wonders which theory will prove true.

"Hey,” Poe calls out, his voice ringing awkwardly in the empty room.

The stormtrooper jumps, looks back over his shoulder a little bit from the end of the hall, and his response is encouraging. Poe doesn't know what he's going to say next, but he opens his mouth anyways.

"‘Name's Poe. What's yours?"

A second passes. The stormtrooper's shoulders tense up, but he stays silent. Poe tries to get some kind of a reading from him- he's kind of short for a stormtrooper, weirdly jumpy, but it's hard to tell anything else underneath all that armor. The silence stretches too long for Poe's taste. It gets awkward, and then it just gets quiet again. Poe makes a split-second decision (the only way he ever makes decisions)- he won't shut up until the stormtrooper talks.

"Listen, no offense, but it's kinda cold in here. You got a heater or something? A blanket?"

No response.

"I guess cuddling for warmth is out of the question?"

Still nothing. Damn, it was going to be a long night.

-FN-2187-

According to the mechanical voice from FN’s helmet radio, 2.7 hours had passed and the prisoner. Wouldn’t. Shut up. _They never talked about this in our training_ , FN-2187 thought, sweat wetting the fabric at the back of his neck. Even behind bars, the pilot put him on edge. Was this some sort of trick? The prisoner had been talking for almost three hours now, his voice get raspy with use. He'd starting coughing, more and more painfully, and FN wonders how long he can keep it up. FN stands stock-still, his back to the prison cell, and wonders if he should report this. How can he report someone for just talking? Suddenly, one of Dameron's senseless ramblings catches his attention.

"-hyperdrive. It's the most amazing feeling. I only got to do it once, when we were on this huge cruiser. We weren't even fighting the First Order on that mission. It was just a territory run-in with a local gang. The Kanjiklub. You heard of them? Anyways, my controls cut out. My co-pilot blacked out. Here's the worst part- you ready for this? Viewscreen got shot out. I mean, there's no wind in space, but you get hit with even the tiniest bit of space crap and that's it for you. It's the most exhilarating thing."

FN-2187 breathes hard beneath his helmet, trying not to give away any emotion. He's always dreamed of flying, and now he gets to hear about it first-hand. The pilot's voice had gone kind of raspy from all the talking. He must be in a lot of pain, FN realizes with a jolt.

"Anyways, the left engine was _absolutely_ shot, and we were about to hit the stratosphere, and not even my spacers could handle that kind of pressure, you know? So we got close enough to be affected in by the planet's gravity, and my mind went white. I couldn’t do anything but pull up on the control handle and wait for impact-" Poe Dameron's words cut off with a pained cough, and the breaths he pulls in sound ragged. FN can hear the prisoner shift, the shift of leather against steel, then silence.

“Hey- are you even listening to me?” The pilot asks, and it sounds pleading. FN panics- talking to the prisoner is a mistake, and he is technically on punishment, but he wants to know _so badly_ how the story ends. He waits a heartbeat, then two, then three, hoping that the prisoner will finish his story. The pause stretches into silence as disappointment washes over FN. Damn the First Order, damn the rules, damn his stupid sanitation job. Damn it all.

 

-Poe-

"What happens next?" comes an eerie robotic voice from the other side of the room, muffled by a helmet.

Poe turns around, shocked, to see the stormtrooper is staring directly at him..

It hurts too much to stand, so Poe kneels next to the bars. "Wh- what?"

The stormtrooper looks over his left shoulder, then his right. By the time he's checked that the coast is clear he's already jogging towards Poe's cell, unfastening the latch behind his helmet.

He kneels in front of Poe close enough to touch him through the bars and pulls off his mask. For a delirious second, Poe wonders if stormtroopers even have faces under all that plastic.

The stormtrooper’s helmet clatters to the ground.

Poe isn’t really sure what he was expecting a stormtrooper to look like, but he wasn’t expecting this. His captor’s face is… kind. He’s got wide, anxious eyes, and his lips are dark and slightly parted with excitement.  He looks like the kind of guy Poe would hope to be partnered up with at training, someone he’d want to get to know a little better. A lot better. _Shit, he's gorgeous_ , Poe thinks, then buries that thought _deep_ where nobody will ever find it. At least it’s a nice face to look at before he dies. He powers on.

"Uh- well, it turns out the planet had almost no atmosphere. It just felt like hitting water, just for a second, and then the feeling was gone"

The stormtrooper frowns, unsatisfied. "But how did you land? How did you make it?"

 

-FN-2187-

FN knew what the prisoner looks like. He was the one who had dragged him, unconscious, into this very cell, but somehow seeing him like this close makes F-N feel… something he doesn’t have a word for, not yet. He crams the feeling, whatever it is, way down. Stormtroopers don’t feel things. Not about other Order members, and especially not about prisoners condemned to torture and a suit-free exit out the airlock.

"The shock of hitting the stratosphere woke up my co-pilot,” the pilot continues, looking a little stunned, ”and so now we were going down in this wreckage of a ship and she was just swearing up a storm. Anyways, she was the one who really owned the stupid thing, so it turns out she had the emergency controls. She got the left engine back to life and it slowed our fall, but I swear we hit the ground so hard and fast we made a made a new crater."

Poe grins at his own joke and the air leaves FN's lungs for a second. FN doesn't quite know what exactly it is he's feeling, but he does know he wants the prisoner to keep talking.

"Wait- wait!" FN sputters. "What kind of ship do you fly? What's it like? I bet you've seen all kinds of planets! They're not all like Starkiller base, right? What are they like?" FN's heart races. This is his chance to learn everything the TIE fighter pilots wouldn’t tell him. Poe hesitates for a second, defensiveness clouding his face. Then he smiles at FN, a real grin, a friendly one, with laughing eyes. FN wishes he could smile like that. For reasons he can’t quite understand, Finn shifts his gloved fingers up just enough that their fingers touch. He wonders if the pilot notices.

"That's an awful lot of questions," Poe teases, raising an eyebrow. "Which stories do you want to hear first?"

"All of them." FN says, and it’s the truth.

 

-Poe-

All of them. Poe can work with this dynamic. The stormtrooper wants something from him, which means Poe's in a slightly better position than he was a few hours ago. He stretches, exaggeratedly.

"All of them? Doubt we'll have time for that," Poe teases. His captor's face falls. Poe decides to make his move. It’s desperate, but time is running out.

"The First Order already has the information it wants from me. How long do I even have left?" Poe asks. He means to say it in a light way, a teasing way, but the thought of dying on this forsaken steel planet makes him choke on the last few words, and it comes out much more seriously than he intended. He looks up at his captor’s face, and the stormtrooper looks broken.

"Stars, Poe, do you really want to know? You've got- eleven minutes before I have to escort you to- well, to the airlocks. I'm so sorry," the stormtrooper says, and it looks to Poe like he really means it.

Eleven minutes. Poe tries to crack a joke, but he can't even think of any. If this is really the end, he wants someone to know how he really felt. Poe can feel a knot, hard and heavy, forming in the back of his throat. There's nothing left- his ship is destroyed, he gave up the location of the map, BB-8 has rolled off to god knows where, and he's waiting for death in a long steel room. Hell, the First Order has probably found the Resistance base already. He thinks of Kylo Ren’s command shuttle slicing out of the fog the way it did on Jakku, imagines General Organa waking up to the sound of screams-

He looks the stormtrooper in his large, dark eyes, and he feels his world falling apart.

-FN-2187-

If a stormtrooper has a heart, FN-2187's is breaking. He wants to escape this, escape the broken look in the pilot's eyes. FN wants to put his helmet back on, stand up, and face that grey gunmetal doorway again. Talking to the prisoner was a terrible idea, and he had been a damn fool to listen to his stories about the stars. Life isn't like that- full of rebellion and promise and danger and excitement, the kind of adventure that Poe's eyes promise when he smiles. Life crushes people like Poe, and the sooner FN-2187 learns that, the better. It’s the lesson, he realizes, that Captain Phasma had been trying to teach him all along. All he has to do now was lead the prisoner into sector S-8, the one that everyone knows prisoners don’t come back from. It wouldn't be long- the walk would only take a minute or two. Hell, he could even leave right now, tell Phasma what he'd done, and just accept his re-education. It would be safer that way, wouldn't it? He knows that life. He knows where he has to be, what he has to do.

Or, he could stay here by the cell, cheeks flushed and making a terrible mistake. A terrible, curly-haired mistake with eyes that glitter with danger and adventures.

FN makes his choice.

 

"My name's FN-2187," he says, and it feels like something final.

Poe face clears with surprise. He leans close enough to the bars that FN can feel his breath catch.

"FN- whaa?" he says, returning to his usual self.

"It's the only name they ever gave me" FN says, and it's just another thing that separates the two of them.

"Well, I ain't using it! F-N, huh? Finn. I'm gonna call you Finn. That all right?"

"Finn. Yeah, Finn! I like that! I like that!" His excitement is infectious, and FN- no, Finn feels like they have something.

"I'm Poe. Poe Dameron," the pilot says, breathlessly. Finn knew that, of course- he was debriefed in the beginning, but it sounds so much better coming from Poe himself. It sounds like a promise.

Finn can feel himself making a terrible, dangerous, fantastic decision.

"Poe, huh? Good to meet you, Poe. I'm going to get you out of here. Can you fly a TIE fighter?"

 

Poe smiles a hero's smile.

 

"I can fly anything."

**Author's Note:**

> literally thanks for screaming abt space boys with me  
> also this is the first fic ive ever written in my life??? so please hit me up with those critiques/comments/concerns if you have them! luv ya


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